The four books were scattered on the table. Four additions to my library and three additional reasons for my mum to nag at me: messiness, compulsive spending, and not caring for my books. The same repertoire that has been rehashed for more than two decades of my life. There was always something more important to do than to deal with those books – they were holiday reads anyway and it will be five months before I can think of taking a proper holiday.

As I went about clearing my inbox and planning my work schedule for the week on a Saturday night – the curse of working from home – I felt two pairs of eyes looking at me. To the right of my laptop, a pair of eyes on one of the book covers emerged from a dark blue background; its pupils containing a flickering flame that seemed to be contorted as a single tear rolls down the contour of the face. To the left, sits mum with her short hair and dimpled smile in a white photo frame from Ikea. The frame is a simple rectangular one without any frills or design – just the way she would have liked it. What mum would have also liked are for those books to be wrapped. Can you learn to treasure your things? If you don’t wrap them, they will be gone very fast! It would have been easy to dismiss that little voice in my head but for some reason, the combined pressures from the gazes of those two pairs of eyes proved too much.

I went about trying to find a roll of clear plastic to wrap those books but it was quite a search. I found a half-used roll in the recesses of my storeroom and I had no idea how it got there or when it was even bought. Perhaps it was mum who left it there as she intended to wrap the mountains of books I bought when all her counsel, as usual, fell on deaf ears. When can you learn to be filial? Look at your father, he treats his mother like a queen!

How do I go about it? I unrolled the clear plastic and pursed my lips as I tried to recall the lesson taught to me years ago; one that was forced upon me as a ‘punishment’ for continuously complaining about being bored during one of my school holidays. Take two books of roughly the same size and thickness and place it on the plastic. Leave some space at the top, bottom and between both books. Flip the plastic over the books. The instructions slowly came back to me. I found myself pressing down the plastic and unwittingly sliding my palms across the surface of the covers carefully like a valet ironing his master’s shirt. The crisp manner in which the plastic laid over the book covers reminded me of how mum often folded the newspaper very meticulously after reading it, almost restoring it to a pristine condition.

Cut the plastic length-wise and the space in between the two books. Be sure to start from the spine outwards. There was an order to everything but what did it matter if it was cut from the spine outwards or the other way around? This will give you more control. It is important that you do it the same way for all the books. Consistency – another one of those virtues that mum cherished. Despite that, I still did not see the logic of it but I followed anyway. Perhaps there was some unknown wisdom behind the countless times she had done it. As a schoolboy, I never had any trouble differentiating my workbook from the rest of the class as it was piled up on the teacher’s desk for him or her to mark. Like a crisp white shirt, mine stood out with a certain sheen as light bounced off the plastic that protects the book. Mine was the proud soldier that was always ready to present himself. This was made possible because she bothered.

Fold the plastic inwards. Start from the length of the book on both covers and followed by the breadth. Ensure the plastic is folded properly by running your fingernail along the edges of the book and secure it with scotch tape. Mum’s neatness also extended to personal appearance and hygiene. Fingernails and hair must always be short. If she had her way, I would still be spotting a crew cut now. This was where a virtue of hers became a quirk. How a crew cut befits me is beyond comprehension. Perhaps I never did grow up in her eyes as how most mothers often viewed their children. But grow up or not, I managed to wrap my first book in decades as I set the one with the eyes on its cover aside.

Picking up the second book, I took a deep breath and recollected mum’s instructions again. At each step, her voice became clearer and aspects of her personality shone through a little more like light hitting the plastic. With each book, I recollected a cycle of her life; four cycles to make up for the four years since I have lost her. Mum resided in the process of an activity that she secretly enjoyed. Within the hour, all four books were wrapped as I leaned back in my chair and caught sight of mum again. Her smile was wider and the yellowish rays of my desk lamp cast a twinkle in her eyes. Unlike the book cover, the flames in her eyes were dancing.

Isaac Tan is currently reading Philosophy and Theatre Studies at National University of Singapore. His works have appeared in Eunoia Review, Eastlit, and Malaise Journal. He blogs infrequently at isaactanbr.wordpress.com.

The post Preservation by Isaac Tan appeared first on Microliterature.

We stumbled out of warm cocoons at the urging of Daddy’s voice, fingers fumbling with shoelaces, half excited, half asleep. “They call it a blood moon,” said Mom from the front seat, where she balanced thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate. “Ew,” said the middle one of us.

From the bluff above the river we shivered and watched, the moon a bloodshot eye. The youngest was afraid of the pines behind us, as if he saw his future in their straight and rigid bars. The oldest thought he tasted the copper of the moon in his mouth, and the sky became ink, oceans of ink, to that distant rocky shore where the atmosphere is death to foreigners. The middle one sat on the blanket, snuggled in her coat, and leaned against Daddy. She collected the thermoses and Styrofoam cups when we left.

“Blood moon,” wrote the middle one in her paragraph response the next morning, “I guess because it’s red.” “It was very dark,” wrote the youngest. And the oldest wrote, “I wish there were people on the moon so that I could go there and be a travel writer. I would write about the moon-food and the moon-drinks and all the little moon-caves and the moon-king, and whether or not he was good.” And the oldest forgot about the strange taste of copper in his mouth.

Brianne Holmes lives and writes in Greenville, NC. Her work has appeared in the Ivy Leaves Journal of Literature and Art, in which she was also named the featured writer in 2012. Currently, she serves as an editorial assistant for the North Carolina Literary Review.  

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No. This is absolutely true, I swear. I saw this guy walking his dog in the park, and I thought, you know, that he’d be good for some.

So I walked up to him, said hello and that, complimented him on his dog, then asked if I could have his phone and his wallet, if he didn’t mind – I don’t see the point in being aggressive – and he said, oh, okay, like we were in a butchers or something and I was one of his regular customers.

He put his hands in his pockets and got them out, wallet from his trousers, iPhone from his inside jacket, then gave me the phone. He was about to hand me the wallet – stuffed full it was too – when he said:

Look, I can see you’re a good sort, you were polite and said nice things about my dog, so can I ask you for something too? You know, he appealed to my better nature. And, well, I’m a sucker for that kind of thing, and I’d already got the phone so I said sure, and he opened his wallet and said:

Look, I’ll give you this. I’ve got no problem you having my credit card, or this for that matter, he went on, pointing at what was a debit card. You can have all the cash too. I can call up my credit card company and bank once we’re done and cancel the cards – after you’ve bought some things, of course, you should get some fun out of them. It’ll take me half an hour to get home and do that and phone the police, if not longer, Benny hasn’t had much of a walk yet, and I can always tell a little white lie about when you mugged me.

Some of this other stuff, though, he carried on, I can’t let you have. I need this pass to get into work, and this is my library card, which I suppose you could have, but – tell me if I’m wrong – you’re not the reading type (I’m not so I didn’t). And as for these, well, do you really need pictures of my wife and kids? And he was right. I didn’t and told him so.

So he took out the photos, library card and pass, handed me the wallet and said, well, it was a pleasure doing business with you. Now, would you like to throw this stick for Benny before we go our separate ways? He really loves chasing sticks.

So I did. And you know what? Benny really did love chasing those sticks.

Stephen Mander is originally from Liverpool in the UK, but has lived and worked in Japan, Australia, Hungary, Slovakia, Syria and Vietnam. He currently lives in Jordan.

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Nan said he never talked about the war much, except when he was drunk, when he would hammer at the piano with his fists, sing There’ll Always be an England, and toast the names of men she knew nothing about.

“What about the medals?” I said.

“What medals Charlie? I don’t remember any medals.”

“He must have got something. Didn’t everyone get a medal?”

“I never got a medal,” she said. “And I spent my ripest years in the underground.”

“But that’s different,” I said.

“They gave us canned whale meat to eat. We only had day old bread. I didn’t see a banana again until I was pregnant. We came out of the station one morning and Ethel’s house down the road was gone. All her underwear was in the street. ‘Well I never,’ I thought. ‘She deserves a medal.’ But she never got one.”

The old man’s time was running out. He’d been up most of the night, connected to his oxygen tank. He couldn’t make it up the stairs any more, so he had to sleep in the living room. When he couldn’t sleep he’d turn on Dish Blû and watch French erotica, cranked up high. I lay awake upstairs, in a different time zone, listening to the slaps and moans of the TV as it mixed with the sounds of the oxygen tank.

Bonjour, Je suis le plombier.

Ah, bon. Je voudrais un peu de plomberie.

Hiss.

Le piston est très grand.

Oui. Toute la monde.

Hiss.

I heard a series of thuds – Granddad was banging his walking stick on the ground for attention. He needed to use the toilet, but couldn’t get out of his chair. I left the bed and made my way down the stairs. When I used to visit here, as a kid, I would run up and down these steps on all fours, or slide down on my cheeks, each bump sending a shock up my spine to the base of my skull, to my teeth. When I was five I would jump from the fourth step to the landing in one leap, arriving hard on the hardwood floor. The piano would rumble in applause. By six I could clear as many steps. Once, I was sure I would be able to clear all the steps in one, frightful bound, but now I took them one at a time, remembering the carpet on the fourth step was loose. Through the marbled glass in the front door’s small window I could see the red light of day creeping up. It would soon be hanging over the O2, the Gherkin, the London Eye, all landmarks that were never here before. The Mirror and the News, each with 80-point headlines screaming out puns, would soon be squeezed through the letterbox and plop on the hallway floor.

Il pleut.

Oui, Je fais la pluis.

Hiss.

Granddad had changed the TV station by the time I opened the living room door. Football was on again.

“Toilet please Charlie,” he said. I hooked my hands under his armpits and lifted. His face, up close, looked like unraveled origami: every fold and crease perfectly intentional, there for a reason, but now so hard to tell what it once was. I got him on his feet and noticed for the first time how short he was.

“Who’s winning?” I said, nodding over at the TV.

“I don’t even know who’s playing anymore Charlie.”

The cheers of the crowd escalated as I helped him through the kitchen and past the sink. “That would sound deep if you hadn’t just been watching blue movies,” I said.

“You know too much.”

“Tell me about the medals.”

“I’ve forgotten all kinds of things. I’ve probably forgotten about any medals.”

“Tell me about the medals or you can piss in your chair tonight.”

He promised to tell me in the morning. I went to bed, expecting to be rewarded with sleep. Instead, I spent the night on the floor, ear to the ground, waiting for each hiss of the oxygen tank.

Ben Hogwood is a journalist and former editorial assistant of the North Carolina Literary Review. He lives in Beaufort, North Carolina, with his wife and son.

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I walk Tango at the off-leash park near our house. My walking routine overlaps the neighbors’. Moms stroll babies, pairs of silver haired ladies walk poodles or spaniels or kind yellow labs. My routine overlaps the Canada Post worker, delivering.

It overlaps pissing Frank.

I call him Frank because I’m certain he’s Italian, that his real name must be Francesco. I don’t know his wife’s name, but I imagine it reeks of catholicism. Magdalena perhaps, or Madonna. She is easily eleven inches taller than Frank, and much more vigorous. She wears her skirts below the knee, pulls her hair into a bun so tight it flattens the skin near her eyes, walks like there is a yardstick taped to her spine.

Every afternoon at 1:45, she opens the front door, shoos Frank onto the porch like a cat.

Frank’s well dressed. Always in the plaid British racing cap and blue melton jacket, sturdy shoes with leather soles. Magdalena checks him at the door before she lets him in public, flattens his collar.

As Tango walks, he stops to pee on every light post. Frank too. They each mark the green standards that line the off-leash park. Tango leaves a vigorous squirt and a scent. Frank, the victim of a tired prostate, leaves a thin, dark line.

Frank’s actually in the process of undoing his fly when the cougar takes him down.

She leaps from the scrub brush the borders the park, bolts across the short grass, and latches onto Frank’s right calf. It’s a meaty part of a man, even a small man like Frank.

She pulls him to the ground, drags him several feet before she separates most of Frank from the piece she wants. She’s a xylophone of ribs, her nipples are dark and swollen to finger size – a litter of pup waits in a den somewhere, desperate to drain her. She glides away, a half-pound of dripping Frank and a swatch of fine flannel clenched in bloody teeth.

I run to Frank. There is so much blood I can smell it. Frank is staring at the part of his leg that is no longer there. “That,” he says through thin lips, “ is one piece of me that woman is no gonna get.” Then he smiles.

I call 9-1-1 and hope for the best.

Frank doesn’t walk now. Instead, every day at 1:45, Magdalena, in thick hose and low-heel black shoes, pushes him in a wheelchair…the same route Francesco once walked, along the line of light posts.

Seated now, Frank’s eyes are even with the dark, dry lines of past pissing. He tucks his hands under the wool blanket on his lap. He smiles and nods at every long, thin stain, the narrow rills of a thousand small rebellions.

Kari Strutt’s short fiction has appeared in Event, FREEFALL, Grain, Prairie Fire, and Room. In addition, an excerpt from her novel in progress appears in Freshwater Pearls, and a creative non-fiction piece is included the anthology, Embedded on the Home Front. “As Regards the Ashes of Peter”, another CNF piece appears in Prism International (51.4).

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Two Weeks Before

I’m going to enter that short story competition even if I’ve never written anything before, and I’m going to win.

And after I’ve won I’m going to see my story anthologised, and once it’s been anthologised I’m going to be asked for more, stories that is, which will be published in Granta, The Paris Review and The New Yorker, and once they’ve been published they are going to be collected in a book, which will be received with praise that will be printed on the back of the paperback (of course there’ll be a paperback), praise using words like ‘assured’, ‘groundbreaking’, ‘breathtaking’, and ‘minor masterpiece’.

And once I’ve won an award or two, I’ll go away and write a novel funded by something like MacArthur or Guggenheim, a novel which will not only please the critics but the general public as well, leading me to being named the ‘voice of a generation’, and I will win more awards just as my subsequent novels will too.

I’ll be the most admired, imitated, influential and respected novelist of my generation, my immortality secured by a magnum opus of breathtaking scope and ambition, a flawed masterpiece that will live forever.

It can’t be too hard. I’ve read The Oxford Book of Short Stories and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. I’ve read Hawthorne and Poe and James and Conrad and Mansfield and Pritchett and Cheever and Carver and Munro. I know the form. I know about twists in the tale and epiphanies. I have a first in English Literature from an ancient university. I’ve read the Canon. I subscribe to The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s. I’ve visited the graves of Eliot and Wilde, and attended workshops and seminars and lectures on the craft and development of the modern short story.

I can’t lose.

Two Seconds After

I lost.

Stephen Mander is originally from Liverpool in the UK, but has lived and worked in Japan, Australia, Hungary, Slovakia, Syria and Vietnam. He currently lives in Jordan.

The post Confidence by Stephen Mander appeared first on Microliterature.

In the dim, narrow corridor, leading to the nursery school, a small boy waited.

“Stand right there while I park the car,” his mother had told him, “I will take you up the stairs and into the school.”

He waited. He was not afraid. He knew she would come back. She always came back. He just wished he was not alone in that huge space. The walls towered over him. He wished for his best friend so they could hold hands and give each other courage.

He couldn’t wait to get inside the cheerful, noisy schoolroom. His little blue plastic knapsack was full of sweets his mother had packed as a special treat and he was eager to share them with his best friends. He had not eaten a single one, though it was hard to resist.

He watched the entrance and the bright street outside. The corridor was dark and quiet. He strained his ears, hoping to hear familiar voices or his mother’s footsteps. It seemed to take so long, hours and hours.

Then he heard an unfamiliar sound.

It was coming from the other direction, the stairs.

Click, click, clickclick, thump, went the sound.

He froze. He turned to see what it was but he already knew.

It was the sound of claws.

The head came first, a big grey head, then the rest of a large, shaggy creature. When it reached the ground he could see how big it was. With its head raised it was taller than he was and its paws were huge, as big as plates, and full of nasty looking claws.

He pressed against the wall, hugging his teddy bear. A wolf, he thought, it’s going to eat me.

The wolf turned its long haired head and looked at him.

The boy trembled. His hands left marks in the fur of the teddy.

The wolf did not attack. It lowered its head and sniffed at a corner. It turned its hairy back to the boy and pawed the ground.

That gave the boy some courage. His legs felt too weak to run, but he did not want to be eaten. He waved a hand, “Shoo.”

The wolf looked up and around at him. It wagged a tail and took a step forward.

“Shoo, shoo, shoo,” cried the boy, desperate now.

Confused, it paused and cocked its head.

“Go away,” cried the boy, his eyes filling with tears.

The wolf did not move. It just stood there, looking at him.

The boy and the wolf stared at each other.

“Go away, go away.”

The wolf opened its mouth and he saw the great white teeth. He pressed back against the wall, shaking.

Then the wolf began to move forward slowly, a step at a time. Step, pause, step.

The boy threw the teddy bear at it. The teddy hit the wall and landed right in front of it, face down. The wolf jumped back, then slowly stretched forward and bent down to sniff. It nuzzled the teddy, flipped it over with its muzzle, investigating thoroughly. Then it lost interest.

It took another step forward.

The boy shut his eyes, waiting for the jaws to crunch on his head, waiting for the inevitable, wondering if it hurt very much to be devoured by a wolf.

A great weight descended on his shoulder. He twisted trying to escape but his tiny strength had no effect. He whimpered, too frightened to scream. He waited for the large white teeth to tear into his tender skin.

The wolf was pulling his arm out. He wondered if it would pull out his other arm too. How would he play if he had no arms? How would he throw a ball?

“Come,” a voice said.

Did wolves talk?

He opened his eyes. It was his mother’s large, warm hand grasping his shoulder. The wolf was on the other side of her and she was bending to scratch its head.

“Did the big, friendly doggie scare you?” mother said.

He still had both his arms.

His mother straightened. The wolf wagged its tail once and trotted out into the sunlight, vanishing from view.

“Come on,” mother said, “We don’t want to be late.”

“It didn’t eat me,” the boy said, “I can still play ball.”

“What?”

Mother was not listening. She was wondering what excuse to give this time. The traffic? Work? She had run out of excuses. She retrieved the teddy and gave it back to him. She took his other hand and led him to the school. He looked back once but the corridor was empty and the wolf was long gone.

The post A Boy and a Wolf by Rohini Gupta appeared first on Microliterature.

Susan Wolfenbarger’s hand had recently begun behaving badly. Of its own volition, it jumped and danced, especially at critical moments—while making decisions, making soup, and making love.

Her husband Scott pushed her hand away one evening after it squeezed too harshly and wrapped it in his.

“Let’s get this looked at,” he said.

The doctors couldn’t explain it. It was like nothing they’d seen before. They determined a hundred things it was not—not neurodegenerative, not muscular, not psychosomatic—but no one had any ideas about what it was.

“It’ll probably go away on its own,” the primary physician announced after three days of tests and observation. “Don’t worry too much about it. Call if anything changes.” She wrote three prescriptions Susan could try, and sent her on her way.

As Susan left the office, her hand jerked out of her pocket and flapped into the air.

#

Over the next few weeks, Susan’s condition worsened. It spread up her arm, across her shoulder, and down her back. The doctors hummed and shrugged and continued ruling out causes while offering no meaningful solutions. She was let go from work. Scott did most of the housework and most of the cooking and grumbled about every bit of it. She loafed about their apartment all day, too embarrassed by her body to even go outside.

She watched, though. She envied the birds that dodged and darted over the small yard of green, dancing together through the air. One afternoon, she tossed stale breadcrumbs out of the window, trying to feed the brown speckled things. Each spasm shot her off the carpet and sent the breadcrumbs across the floor. Scott would throw a fit when he got home from work. Three stories below, a bird twisted its head from the breadcrumbed grass and focused its beady eyes on Susan’s. In two, three wingbeats, it perched on the sill beside her. A spasm contorted her spine.

“Well?” The bird chirped. “Get moving!”

The bird ruffled its wings and gave an experimental hop across the sill, then turned to stare at her. It blinked, twisted its head, then hopped again. When a spasm sent Susan’s arms akimbo, the bird grew more excited. It squawked, fluttered, and jumped on the sill. It tilted its head and chirped inquiringly, but Susan made no response. A moment later, the bird flew off, calling to its flock. The birds whirled into the air in a choreographed dance, wheeling over the apartments and toward the horizon.

“Wait!” Susan shouted out the window as her arms jerked again. She pulled herself onto the narrow sill and sat, her legs hanging into the air. The birds whirled, circling back, racing toward her. She wasn’t sure what Scott would think. She wasn’t sure she cared. She pushed herself off the ledge to join the birds.

Her back spasmed, her arms flailed. And she flew.

On the sidewalk below, a girl jumped and pointed. “Mommy, Mommy! It’s superman!”

“Nonsense,” her mother replied. “Come along.”

Miranda Forman teaches and writes in North Carolina. When she isn’t working with students or figuring out a story, she enjoys eating and exercising.

The post Nonsense by Miranda Forman appeared first on Microliterature.

The animals were all dead, so forget about two by twos. Forget about personal objects; we had the clothes we were wearing and sharpened sticks.

Well, we had the Ark, too, but we did not think of it as ours. We thought of it as a thing we would inhabit temporarily or a thing that would end up swallowing us whole. The Ark was a whale and we were going to live or die inside of it.

We had the rain, yes, but the rain was constant. We had lived with it for years. The rain was air to us. The rain was our bodies, things that existed for reasons we could not understand.

We lay over each other in the ark, until there was not a part of our bodies that did not touch the body of another. We lay like that, in total darkness, and waited for the Ark, for the water, to sweep us away and into the thing that came next, which was a mystery. All things, we decided, were a mystery and it didn’t matter if you solved it or not. All that mattered was that you cling to whatever was around and wait for the water to move around you and reshape you into something beautiful.

Kevin Wilson is the author of a story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, and a novel, The Family Fang. He lives in Sewanee, TN, where he teaches at The University of the South.

The post The Ark by Kevin Wilson appeared first on Microliterature.

Book One: Human Attachment by Colin Lowland

This book is dedicated to my girlfriend Rose. This book could not have been written without her love and inspiration.

Book Two: The Kin Relationship: A Human Perspective by Colin Lowland

This book is dedicated to my wife Rose and my daughters Jennifer and Kate. This book could not have been written without their support and tolerance.

Book Three: Perspectives on Human Aging by Colin Lowland

This book is dedicated to Josephine. This book could not have been written without her willingness to passionately engage with my work, first as a PhD student and later as my wife.

Book Four: The Role of Narcotics In Human Life by Colin Lowland

This book is dedicated to the staff at the Phoenix Rehab Centre. Without their care and support I would not be alive today and this book would not have been written.

Book Five: On Religion by Colin Lowland

This book is dedicated to my wife Rose and my daughters Jennifer and Kate. This book could not have been written without their love and forgiveness.

Alfred Archer is a Philosophy PhD student, tutor and occasional lecturer at The University of Edinburgh. He lives in Glasgow.

The post Dedication by Alfred Archer appeared first on Microliterature.

The only time I notice a minor side effect of my heart is when I’m sitting on my toilet, locked in my bathroom, which is attached to my office, adjacent to Senator Field’s office, on the fifth floor of the capitol building, which is capped with a gold dome and set within a wide lush lawn. Her bathroom and mine share lead pipes, fixtures of a certain age and temperament, wood doors that swell in the summer, and a thin wall which permits an auditory intimacy never acknowledged between us.

As I engage in the business of law making, through emails, hearings, debates, and votes, I sip and sip from a bottle containing ice water, a thin slice of lemon, and a sprig of fresh mint from the planter on my patio. I avoid any petty reprieves as well as the public restrooms. I practice my Kegel exercises while networking with peers.

When I am nearly doubled over with the effort of containment, when I must cross my legs as gracefully as heels and stress and situation allow, I beg off and make excuses – important call with the Governor, you know – and dash to my porcelain throne, fumble with my zipper, tear down my drawers. Then, and only then, do I exult in wild release, the sweet surrender born of anticipation and desperate need, the only primitive ecstasy allowed within our pinstriped confines, eyes closed, ears drowned with the deafening waterfall of which I am the source.

I am the melting snows of the Himalayas. I am the monsoon. I am the flood.

While sacrificing the waters of the world, the only solitary moment in my day, I meditate, recalling that this same liquid recycles endlessly through time within this closed circuit we call Earth – through triceratops and saber-tooth tigers, through oceans and clouds, through sparrows and homo sapiens.

Then, as the waters ebb and I return to myself, I see it. First, it is just a blurred vibration in my peripheral vision. Then I adjust my eyes, recalibrate my depth of vision, and focus upon this object which springs from me. A lock of hair has escaped my coiffure, fallen forward over my left eye, and trembles to the tempo in my temple, a faint echo from the unbound pump in my chest, its perpetual waves flowing through the rivers of my celestial body, rippling through ever more distant tributaries.

It is only then, when I sit without distraction, when I sit without movement, upon my throne, that I see that small side effect of my heart.

Julie Jones is a fiction writer residing in Connecticut. She works full time as a law librarian and is writing her first mystery novel.

The post My Temple by J.M. Jones appeared first on Microliterature.

“You were a liar, cheat, thief and con man,” my brother said to me after he hugged me hello and steered us to the airport bar. He waved the waitress over and ordered a double gin and tonic.” Don’t get me wrong, I love you and I’ve always loved you and looked up to you.”

He looked at me as if to hear a response and when he didn’t he took a gulp to finish his last drink and continued. “You never cared about anyone but yourself and I don’t want to hear your crap about mommy beating you and telling you that you were an accident and not wanted. That has nothing to do with how you made her feel. She constantly cried over your behavior and you can tell me all you want that if you didn’t steal food from the market you worked at we’d have gone hungry. Well let me tell you something, we would gladly have gone hungry than to have a thief in our midst bringing shame to mommy with every bite. She also knew where you were getting the money you brought home. You couldn’t have earned that much at the corner market.

“You think this is funny? Waitress bring me another. Right, a double. You caused nothing but grief. You committed fraud when you took pictures of the roller skaters at their convention and then couldn’t deliver and mommy had to make good on the money and she didn’t have any money and you knew that. You know that story you tell about mixing up the chemicals when you developed the film is so much bull; it’s so you. You were eleven and old enough to know better.

“You said you missed me and wanted to get together for a couple of days and catch up; well feel free to catch up. Maybe you don’t want to talk about stealing her three silver dollars when you were eight but she cried and cried when she found them gone.

“You keep writing stories about a mother who beats her son, who jabs at him with a broomstick while he hides under the bed and don’t you think that people know who you are writing about? Don’t you care that making her life miserable when she was alive was enough so now you have to besmirch her memory while she’s in her grave.

“And don’t think I don’t know you want to tell me that you paid for her grave and her funeral. You always made it clear that you blamed mommy because we grew up poor and you hated poor. Too bad. Live with it. You’re almost sixty so get over it and never talk to me again about her. I don’t know why I did this but I brought you a bunch of pictures of mommy when she was younger and us three boys with her, you probably don’t have any interest but at least I’m doing the decent thing and showing them to you. You want me to let you borrow them to make copies? Fat chance.

“Tell me. Why did you hate her so much that you made her cry every day? She never once, waitress another double please, she never once complained about you but I’d see her crying and I’d ask her why and it was always you. You want another, No? Better that way; you could never hold your liquor. Why did you always have to get in trouble at school and make mommy go to the principal’s office? Didn’t you care? You stayed out late and never called and came home scuffed up like you were in fights all the time but you always had a bankroll. So what if you’re the one who gave me my allowance all those years and bought me my first car. Where did the money come from? It wasn’t honest money. Mom knew that and it broke her heart to take food and rent money from you. You were one miserable fucking kid.

“One more and we’ll leave the airport and go to our hotel and change and see the town and catch up. I hope you got us a decent hotel and a decent car. You did remember to rent a car didn’t you? It would be just like you to forget something as important as that. We can start getting reacquainted on the way to the hotel. I hope it’s on the beach. Is it a good one with its own beach and pool? Does the pool have a swim up bar? You can afford those things. You only cared about making a lot of money and not how we felt at home so spend it, Mr. Big Shot.  I can pay my share. I’m no free loader but you set up this get-to-gether so you pay and by the way flying here economy sucked; I’ll bet you didn’t. Waitress . . .

Hey! Where you going with your bag? The car rental’s this way. You’re heading towards the ticket agent. You never were very bright. I see nothing has changed.

Paul Beckman’s stories are widely published online and in print. A few of the magazines are: Boston Literary Magazine, The Brooklyner, Connecticut Review & Thrice Fiction. He has a collection of flash fiction coming out in early 2015 from Big Table Publishing.

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Out of all of the boys who turned into men who lived on our block, Fred was the one who was called on by the Lord. I hadn’t seen him since I left North Carolina for Washita. That had been about two years prior. Or was it three? I don’t remember. I called him up and we decided on lunch, rather than dinner. I preferred that. With lunch there is no need for forced familiarity. I remember that we sat down at the restaurant and I realized it was a mistake. The service was slow, so I couldn’t just get my food, scarf it down and leave without saying a word. Instead I had to listen to him.

“It all was because of the hospital. At first it was easy. Nothing hard at all. Just went in and out to do the bedpans.”

Fred wasn’t ready to go directly from ordination to a congregation, so he taught at seminary school while he mentally prepped himself for the task. He worked as an orderly to make a little extra money on the side.

“This isn’t a crisis of faith. I haven’t stopped believing in God or anything like that. It’s the hospital that did it. I saw the people in the rooms and I would go in and I’d pray to God that they wouldn’t notice me. How terrible is that? I was terrified that they would see and want to talk. But often they would just sit there, all morphined up. The women would look terrible, no makeup. With giant crow’s feet and bags underneath their vacant eyes.”

He reached up into his beard and started to pull out individual red hairs. I had the urge to order a stiff drink, but the waitress was nowhere in sight.

“The men were no better. Hooked up to catheters and you could tell whenever they relieved themselves. They had this look of singular bliss, as if that was urinating was the only transcendent thing that could elevate them to heaven. I saw them and I shrunk. I saw them and I was revolted. Since when is a man of God concerned with the aesthetics of his flock?”

I looked like I was about to vomit. “Please stop talking,” I said.

“I prayed every night for the strength to do my spiritual duty, but every time I was walking the wards, a false prayer, a prayer of cowardice came out. I only met one man in shape enough to talk. About fifty-five. He had stage four liver cancer that had metastasized to his pancreas and bladder. Jaundiced eyes and spotted hands. He was angry and mean. Always shouting for me to give him a drink. And he always had to pee right before I took out the pan. He’d give me a wink, too,” Fred said.

I reached out my hand as if to touch him, but for some reason I pulled back.

“Then one night I was in there and he wasn’t his usual irascible self. His eyes were even yellower than they usually were. He now had morphine pumping through his veins, but he looked sharper than the rest. He looked capable of talking. ‘You wanna know why I’m an asshole?” he said. ‘I’m gonna die, man.’ What was I supposed say? So I just followed protocol. The man wouldn’t stop talking to me. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you. I’m gonna die. Don’t you care?’ Of course I cared. You gotta believe me. I just froze and I left him sitting in his own soiled bedpan.”

I just sat there and did nothing to comfort him. I just looked at the menu and thought of the t-bone steak.

“I went out into the hallway and I saw a nurse that I recognized walking in my direction. I motioned for her to speak with me and I said to her, ‘That man in room four hundred needs to see a chaplain. He’s in spiritual distress.’ The lady just looked at me and said, ‘But sir, aren’t you a minister?’ I just leaned my head against the wall and cried.”

I looked down at the menu and thought about the prime rib sandwich. I looked at Fred. He looked at me.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” he said.

The waitress arrived and asked us what we wanted. I ordered my sandwich and she took the menu away. I didn’t have anything else to stare at.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he said.

Eric Janken is a published undergraduate poet at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. His work is published in The Peel, the acclaimed student literary magazine on campus. He is also the 2014 recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award in Creative Writing.

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The wanderer was an old man. Omnipresent. Walking about in Old Downtown, up and down the broken-up sidewalk and rubble. Ambling through New Downtown, past white-collared foreigners and cool glass-paneled skyscrapers. He could be seen about the Red Light District during the day, the Music District in the evenings. The times in between, the wanderer could be found in the Muslim Quarter, the Twelfth District, People’s Square, Memorial Park, College District and Riverside. East, west, north, south and all places in between was the land of the wanderer. The wanderer was the one and only king of the city.

The wanderer was a short man. His face the color and texture of lumpy porridge gone cold and dry. He had a full head of hair, white as light, sparsely covering his head. He wore a thin jacket, faded and covered in dirt, mud, ash and dust. His slacks were two sizes too big for him and his burlap shoes were riddled with holes.

He carried in front of him a woven basket—much bigger than he was—strapped to the front of his chest. In it were round sweets. A hard shell made of puffed rice and covered in sugar that was filled with a mixture of syrup and grain alcohol. The sweets were filed in rows. Skewers, each with four sweets, were shelved like stalks of corn, and the sharp end of each skewer pointed to the sky.

The wanderer did not say a word. He did not announce what he was selling. He simply walked the streets and people came to the wanderer—the few that ever had.

The expression he wore was blank. But the skin on his face was sagging, worn from the decades of wind, water, sand, snow, and smog lashing his skin. Worn from witnessing the city grow from a one-lane town with no cars or foreigners, when the slaughtering of donkeys and chickens happened out in the open—and when the world wasn’t so loud. Yet as the mighty world spun, he walked and walked. And spun it did for all around him wildly grew into a lush glass-and-tar-and-concrete jungle. The expression he wore was blank because he seemed (I assume) unsure of how to feel. In this new world, was a smile still a gesture of happiness? Did people still cry or feel upset even though they are richer than a king like himself could fathom?

And so he continued to straggle along in silence, as he had for decades. For walking was the only human-like action he could recognize when he saw others pass him by.

Ravi Venkataraman is a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher in Chengdu, China, managing editor of MaLa – the China Bookworm Literary Journal and a member of the public relations team for Newfound Journal. He writes—sometimes.

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Ida stared at the eggshell wall of her drab county office. In younger years, she might have burned with humiliation. Instead, she just stared with numbness. She made no effort to block out or hide from the laughing voices in the hallway, but she also made no move to confront them.

“A sled?!” One of the female voices howled, delighted. “Oh, my god.”

More laughter. Camaraderie, thought Ida. That’s good.

After decades spent in the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, Ida was used to hearing gallows humor in the hallway. Of course, it was a little different when the humor was directed at her.

Ida imagined the 1970s-style office on fire, flames licking at the asbestos-stuffed walls. Suffocating smoke. Deafening alarms. Clouding confusion. Court-appointed attorneys scrambling to access stairwells. Meanwhile, Ida would still be on the eighth floor of the county building, unable to walk down the escape stairwell due to her 400-pound frame. She would wait while her designated “helper” got her county-issued plastic sled, set it up at the top of the stairwell, and then unceremoniously stuffed her fat flesh into the sled and pushed her down the emergency stairwell. Ida imagined her teeth rattling as the sled clattered down each staircase.

Ida sighed. Without taking her eyes off her drab wall, she reached for another doughnut and stuffed the entire pastry into her mouth without bothering to chew.

JD Greene is an aspiring author whose observations of the criminal justice system have led her to believe that the truths about it are stranger than fictions.

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His knuckle catches the corner of my eye, and even before the stars cloud my vision, the litany of apologies starts. He says he’s sorry he’s been drinking too much and for getting fired again. To the list of old favorites, he adds he’s sorry for dragging me down with him. What he doesn’t say echoes in my swollen ear, that he’s sorry he can’t break the cycle.

My boss, Darlene, looks me over as I walk into the break room the next morning. Her lips pucker like a pink-frosted donut, and one over-plucked eyebrow raises as she speaks: “You can’t wear those sunglasses during your shift.” I knew she’d say that. We have this choreographed routine where I show up wearing sunglasses and she pretends she doesn’t know why.

I think about protesting—tap-dancing my part of the routine—but decide against it. “Fine,” I say, removing the glasses.

“Whoa, honey, that eye!” Darlene tsks, all three-hundred pounds of her shimmying in judgment. “When you gonna take my advice and kick him out?” She looks down her nose at me like I’m too stupid to understand.

I run my timecard through the machine and slide my arms through my Frank’s Market smock. The buttons strain, but I force them through before answering Darlene. I’ve tried to explain to her that sometimes he’s just stressed and I get in the way—wrong place, wrong time and all that. Other times my smart mouth gets me into trouble. I think about telling her the truth—that his boss is an asshole who doesn’t appreciate how hard he works—but she’d probably think I was talking about her and take offense. “I don’t know, Darlene,” I say. “I guess I’ll kick him out when the wind is just right.” I walk past her toward the cash registers.

With the holidays receding in the rearview mirror, no one has money for grocery shopping. By two o’clock, I’m the only cashier left up front. My feet ache, but I fake a smile for every little old lady who comes to buy her Metamucil and cat food. Most ignore me as they snatch the bagged items from my hand as if I’d want to steal them. The few who look at me don’t even bother to stifle their gasps when they see the purple mess of my eye. “Ran into a door,” I explain and smile at one woman, but she looks away as if she doesn’t hear me.

My shift ends at three, and I count my cash drawer. Darlene watches my progress from a too-small stool in the corner of the break room. I try not to look, but her body oozes over the seat like the melted red wax on the top of a Maker’s Mark bottle. I know she can’t leave until I’m finished, but I swear she’s sitting there just waiting to preach at me some more.

Finally, she speaks: “You can’t keep comin’ to work lookin’ like that, you know.” I ignore her—pretend I’m counting change. “Customers complain, and I can’t keep makin’ excuses.”

I finish counting and pass off the drawer to Darlene. “Fine,” I say and punch out. She acts like she’s doing me a favor. She acts like I want to come to work with a black eye or a swollen jaw or a split lip. She acts like I have a choice.

I throw my red coat on over my smock, not even bothering with my sunglasses in my rush to get out of the store. My feet are tired, but I take the long way home anyway.
On my way through the park, I pass a family feeding pigeons. A little girl sits with them but apart. A breeze ruffles the dark curls sticking out below her hat, and as I pass her, I can’t help but look at her again over my shoulder. The girl catches my backward glance, looks up at my face, reads my bruises, frowns. Reflexes draw my hand over my swollen belly, and I hurry past.

I walk and walk, through the park, down a street not my own, up an alleyway, and across town, but I can’t walk her out of my head. It’s not until I’ve walked several more blocks that I realize my house keys aren’t in my pocket.

For only a moment, I consider retracing my steps to find them.

Amy Morris-Jones lives, works, and writes along the shore of Lake Michigan, focusing mostly on issues and scenery that capture the Midwest in general and Michigan specifically. With two novels currently in revision, a third in progress, and her most recent short story publication forthcoming as a finalist in the Bartleby Snopes All Dialogue Contest, she has plenty to keep her distracted as the snow piles up outside her door. She can be found sporadically at http://amorrisjones.blogspot.com/ and @amorrisjones.

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The silent white noise buzzed like a million earthly things were living inside my head. I heard all of it, and I heard none of it.

I didn’t hear the butterfly flutter as she rapidly flew past me on her way to meet her lover, by the wildflowers. I blinked and lost sight of the deer scampering through the forest; his long legs striding before quick, gallant leaps. I didn’t hear his heart pounding against the walls of his chest or his exaggerated breath, as he tried to escape the gunshots. I didn’t hear the raindrops as they rolled off a leaf, petrified of their own descent, tumbling at a frightening speed, fated to become part of a dark, mucky puddle, plink…plink…plink – splat.

I didn’t hear the slide projector clicking photographs into focus – pictures of my ten-year old self, chasing a butterfly – pictures of my twenty-year old self, in hunting gear – pictures of a thirty year old man drowning in life’s debris, plink…plink…plink – splat.

I wasn’t listening to the murmur of gossiping tongues lashing venomous tittle-tattle into the walls of the café. I didn’t watch as their contorted mouths spoke of ‘the tragic incident’ which took place in the red house across the road – or as their clenched hands flew apart in a ‘what can you do?’ motion – or as their index fingers made a rolling gesture by the sides of their heads. I wasn’t listening to the sound of the creaking steps as I climbed the stairs to the attic. I didn’t hear the window open – or the sound of my hands taking hold of the white-trimmed roof – or the sound of my body squeezing through the small window frame – or that of my footsteps climbing the slanted roof to its highest peak.  I wasn’t listening when the mountains in the background laughed at me, and spat small gusts of wind in my direction. I couldn’t hear or see the church bells. I could only imagine them putting on a fictitious show of violence by thrusting themselves against each other, ding-dong…ding-dong…ding-dong; then retreating to the sound of their own isolation – bong – bong – bong.

I didn’t see the picture in the local paper, the one right in front of the café, where I first met my ex-wife. Or the one of my splatter covered with a white sheet, next to the red house; the one that I grew up in. Or the picture of myself and dad standing in front of a mountain, where we used to go hunting, where I thought that I had shot a deer, where dad bled to death in my arms. I didn’t see my mother clad in black and standing on the top step of the church, and I couldn’t hear her inconsolable sobs. I never heard those slowly tolled church bells that would have rung at a funeral; ding – dong…ding – dong…bong – bong – bong.

The silent white noise buzzed like a million unearthly things were living inside my head. From a cramped wooden box, under six feet of dirt – I heard all of it – and I heard none of it.

Debra Danz resides in Switzerland, and is currently writing a book of short, dark stories as a dedication to her late husband. Her work has been published in ’50 – Word Stories’, as well as ‘The Bookends Review’, and is forthcoming in their 2014 anthology.

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I won’t lie to you. It was not how I saw myself going. The niggling details prick the ego. But it was swift, that much can be said.

It was a loathsome winter. Worms beneath the icy tundra, their pink fleshy heads frozen forever out of reach. Brain addled by starvation. Flesh wasted on the bone. Plumage desiccated of all piquancy. Surely I’d been cursed by the ghost of Tantalus.

But, for one day, one glorious day, the sun drunk on its own luminosity, the bitter claw of winter retracted. I was released! Unloosed! Liberated and delivered! The whole of life exuberant, for that day. I could hear the trees inhale, their buds push, their roots stretch. I could smell the perfume of rotted leaves, mold, and fungi. I could see the bark glow, sap quickening beneath the crust. Life! I feared it gone from the world forever, just as I did every year. And again, I rejoiced in my error!

I took to the skies. How could I resist the sweeping updrafts, the rush of bright air, the very ebb and flow of existence? I was transported, altered, and utterly unstable. I took risks; risks I’d scarcely take at summer’s end when limber, meaty, and ripe. I’d seen others do this before. Fools! I’d scoffed. And now I was the ninny, darting in and out of traffic, playing Duck-Duck-Goose with the sedans and SUVs. Had I heeded my education, it might have turned out different. I, top bird at Icarus University, author of award winning honors thesis, The Transmogrification of Solar Energies and Pathologies of the Psyche, should have recognized the signs. LaWSI¹ was etched upon my beak. Patient presented, I might have noted, as euphoric, with transient vigour, manic flux, and delusions of grandeur.

So it was that I came to be acquainted with the voracious grill of a Ford F-150 as it soared down I-84 West at 72 miles per hour at 11:53 a.m. on Saturday, March 8, 2014. That first bite cleaved my left wing from its socket and sent me hurtling down the highway, feathers literally flying. I won’t belabor the point. Suffice it to say, the pain devoured me whole. But it was a busy day. I hadn’t even tumbled to a stop when a late model rusted-out Honda Civic sans hubcaps (oh! the ignominy!) rushed to greet my fate.

Now, I know what you’re wondering. And no, my life did not flash before my eyes. Robins don’t go in for those kinds of histrionics. If you didn’t get it when you were here, one more second certainly isn’t going to make a difference. The pavement, if you must know, was all that flashed; the white dash of lane lines signaling S-O-S as I performed my horizontal pirouette.

In any case, in these situations, one always hopes the human doesn’t see you at all. They can be so flighty as layers of socialization, instinct, and emotion squabble with raw ethics and in no time at all, they’ve convinced themselves that it’s better not to kill you. Fortunately for me, I only had time to pray Please don’t swerve! Please don’t swerve! Please don’t swerve! and they didn’t.

¹ Late Winter Solar Inebriation, or LaWSI (pronounced lä‘sē), was first discovered by Thornbill Laureate Professor Woodline Thrush in her airparting research conducted on the I-95 corridor. Alas, she later succumbed to same.

Julie Jones is a fiction writer residing in Connecticut. She works full time as a law librarian and is writing her first mystery novel.

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My parents told me they’ve stopped fighting in the car because it upsets their dog, Nancy. Once, when my sister and I were nine and seven, my father tried to drive the car into a motorway barrier because my mother asked him to slow down. We all screamed and then he took us to McDonalds to make up for it. Nancy is sensitive because she belonged to my grandmother, who is dead now, and who let her have her own electric blanket because the house was often drafty and cold. “Nancy is my reason for being,” she would say and pat her under the blanket.

I found someone who I thought was my reason for being, but it turns out I was wrong. He was my boyfriend for a long time and then he was not. I thought he would be again, but I was wrong about that too. The last time I saw him we had a fight that made my Korean neighbour cry. “So much yelling”, she wrote to me in a note afterwards. “Scary for me.”

We did yell a lot and we broke things too. I smashed a bowl, then a vase. I shattered my happiness on him. There was a time when we made the bed together each morning and slept interlaced each night. It was an unusual bed, a large frame with twin mattresses and two sets of pillows, sheets and duvets. We laughed because my side was always neater than his. “I want to be the bed you make,” he’d say.

“How many times did you fuck her?” I asked, as if that mattered. We had been fighting for a long time then, calming then growing wild again like the sea. He told me and I watched the skin under his eye turn red from where my hand had been.

“That’s one-tenth of how I feel,” I said, as if pain could be divided and delivered like that.

He had a very beautiful face, even when it was crying. Like a samovar, I always thought. He knelt on the floor and I knelt too and we cried together like children. He took my head in his hands and cupped my ears. I thought, it might all be okay. I thought, we might be able to get back from this.

“I wanted to be good enough,” he said. That was not what I needed. I can be good enough, couldn’t he say that? I asked him, perhaps I pleaded with him, but he had already given us up.

Afterwards, I took out the dustpan and brush and ran my hands under cold water. I replaced the books on the shelf and began to sweep the glass. I picked the flowers I’d bought that morning off the floor. The morning’s hope weighed like a stillborn in my arms.

Maybe, I thought, maybe if I’d got a dog. Then we wouldn’t have fought like that. Then we would have had something to protect.

Coco Mellors is originally from London and now lives in New York. She is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at New York University while working as a fashion copywriter.

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Roberto Núñez had come to America to play baseball but had ended up an avid baseball card collector instead. It had started with a talisman, the card of 35-year-old rookie Jim Morris that he kept in his wallet, as a reminder that there was no such thing as too late. Over the years, he added players to his deck, and by the time he signed a $12,000 contract to play at Triple-A for the Zephyrs, he’d collected thousands of cards, all organized into laminated three-ring binders that he would flip through each night before bed, gazing at their faces, then memorizing the stats written on the card backs.

Now 41 and his career at an end, Núñez had settled into a two-bedroom apartment above his own baseball card shop, and he would shuttle between the two floors during the day as customer traffic dictated.  The store didn’t make much money: New Orleans had never had a Major League team, so interest in card collecting amongst the city’s inhabitants was low, but Núñez didn’t care; he was jus happy to be working for himself.

He had come to New Orleans in early 2007, his 8th ball club in 10 years. After two seasons, the Zephyrs failed to offer him a new contract but he decided to stay in the city anyway, turning down an outstanding offer to play for the Storm Chasers of Omaha. He was old and it was over, he reasoned.  He was ready to just settle into something more comfortable, so he quit baseball and bought the storefront in Central City.

He liked to tell people that he was a self-made man, that back home in Santo Domingo nobody could believe what he had done with himself, but in truth, he came from a well-to-do family: his father was the CEO of Falcondo, a successful ferronickel mining company.  Núñez’s move to the States represented downward mobility, not upward, and the two-story redbrick building that he was now settling into was purchased from money he had been gifted on his 40th birthday, when he told his parents that he was quitting the game.

In the afternoons, after school, Marjorie would come by the shop, and when nobody was in the store the two would go upstairs to his apartment and make out for hours on his red leather sofa. He would always leave the storefront door unlocked and the register unattended, so hurried did he feel to get her into his arms, but she would always remind him halfway up the stairs, and then they would go back down and lock the door together, giggling.

He loved Marjorie – she was cheerful and graceful and so much smarter than him – but she was only 17, and so he made rules for how physical they could get.

“My parents would never forgive me if they found out,” he said, deathly serious, and she laughed because she thought it was funny that an old man like him would still fear the wrath of his parents, but she accepted his rules, which were that until her 18th birthday he wasn’t allowed to “enter her in any way”.

She never thought of him as a true adult (she had first met him at a baseball game, watching him slide around in the dirt) but she liked the restrictions, and thought it made their encounters more seductive.  He liked them because they allowed him to sleep at night.

In the early evenings, the two would settle in at the shop for hours, the flat screen television on, watching the Rangers when the Rangers were playing, and watching whatever other team was on when the Rangers were not. She didn’t love baseball but she liked it enough, and since they always muted the TV it meant they could talk at length without making eye contact and say the things they otherwise might not be brave enough to say.

On the Tuesday night after Easter, it was unseasonably hot and since Núñez hadn’t yet installed his air-conditioner, he left the window on his fire escape open to help cool his room. A burglar climbed in, shoved a 9 millimeter pistol in his face, and tied his hands to a chair behind his back with an orange vinyl extension cord.

“Where’s your wallet?” the burglar whispered.

“On the dresser, by the clock,” Núñez whispered back, and then was shot twice in the back of the head.

The burglar took the $63 from Núñez’s wallet, and then went downstairs into the card shop. He couldn’t get into the electronic safe – with the Mickey Mantle rookie card and the Cal Ripken autograph – but he took the keys to Núñez’s Mercedes, a 1998 C230 with 135,000 miles on it, and sold the vehicle for $600 to a junkyard before daybreak.

Núñez’s mother and father and three siblings flew in for his funeral, and his mother cried over the coffin and threw red roses. Knowing they would be there, Marjorie avoided the service.

They stayed at a bed and breakfast in the French Quarter. Even though one should not have an appetite during times of mourning, they could not get enough of the spicy peel-and-eat shrimp, and ate very well while in town.

His building was turned over to his family, who sold it for a profit: that part of Central City was coming up in a big way. Developers tore it down and turned it into a luxury condominium. His baseball cards went to his eldest brother Juan, who not knowing what to do with them shoved them into a white plastic mail tote, which he then left in his bedroom closet where his cat mistook it for a litter box.

Adam Janos resides in New York City, where he works as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. His creative prose has been published in Word Riot, Narratively, and Múlt és Jövő. You can find him on Twitter at @adamtjanos.

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